One of my customers asked how to install MSDE on Windows 10 and Windows 7, one of his old software need it, after some study, I found the answer, and share it.
MSDE aka Microsoft SQL Server Data Engine /Microsoft Data Engine /Microsoft Desktop Engine, is a relational database management system developed by Microsoft. It is a scaled-down version of Microsoft SQL Server 7.0 or 2000 which is free for non-commercial use as well as certain limited commercial use. It was introduced at Microsoft TechEd in May 1999,[1] and was included as part of Microsoft Office 2000 Developer Edition. Its successor, SQL Server Express was released in November 2005.[2] Vendor support of MSDE ended on April 8, 2008.[3]
From MSDE download webpage, we know,
Important Note Microsoft SQL Server Desktop Engine (MSDE) will not be supported on the Microsoft Vista operating system. If you plan to build an application and redistribute a database with it, you should consider using SQL Server 2005 Express Editioninstead. For more information, see the Running SQL Server on Windows Vista page on microsoft.com.
In one word, MSDE by default does not support Windows 7 or Windows 10.
but with the help of the following Widows batch script, you can successfully install it.
takeown /f %SystemRoot%\SysWOW64\sqlunirl.dll /a
icacls %SystemRoot%\SysWOW64\sqlunirl.dll /grant *S-1-5-32-544:f
IF NOT EXIST %SystemRoot%\SysWOW64\sqlunirl.bak move %SystemRoot%\SysWOW64\sqlunirl.dll %SystemRoot%\SysWOW64\sqlunirl.bak
C:\MSDERelA\setup.exe INSTANCENAME="alitrack" SAPWD="dotcom" SECURITYMODE="sql"
net start mssql$alitrack
move /y %SystemRoot%\SysWOW64\sqlunirl.bak %SystemRoot%\SysWOW64\sqlunirl.dll
icacls %SystemRoot%\SysWOW64\sqlunirl.dll /remove *S-1-5-32-544
icacls %SystemRoot%\SysWOW64\sqlunirl.dll /grant *S-1-5-32-544:(GR,GE,WO)
icacls %SystemRoot%\SysWOW64\sqlunirl.dll /setowner *S-1-5-80-956008885-3418522649-1831038044-1853292631-2271478464
pause
save it as batch file(or download the last version fromalitrack/msde_on_win10) and run as administrator.
and you can have a look the installation video here.
references,